Newsom right on National Guard, but immigration's changing nature must be addressed

AP

Honduran Delia Romero, 24, sits with her children in their sleeping area last week at a shelter in Piedras Negras, Mexico, near the Texas border, She is part of a caravan of 1,600 people seeking asylum in the United States.

Honduran Delia Romero, 24, sits with her children in their sleeping area last week at a shelter in Piedras Negras, Mexico, near the Texas border, She is part of a caravan of 1,600 people seeking asylum in the United States. (AP)

Sensible and defensible. That’s how best to describe Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to reassign all but 100 of the 360 California National Guard troops stationed on the southern border, which undercuts President Donald Trump’s hyperbolic claim that there is a “national emergency” at the border. Here in San Diego — easily the largest U.S. city along the border — our proximity to Mexico is a gigantic economic plus, not the nightmare the president depicts.

Beyond that crucial point, Newsom’s characterization of Trump’s deployment of border troops as “political theater” is borne out by news accounts from last April. That’s when the president surprised his aides with a series of tweets and statements declaring a need to militarize the border to protect against an influx of unauthorized immigrant criminals and drugs. If there was a border emergency, that was news to his national security team.

Trump went on to make the purported border “invasion” a major theme in his fall campaigning for Republicans, capped with his October decision to deploy more than 5,200 active-duty military troops to the border after reports that a caravan of migrants was headed toward the U.S. While the GOP held on to the Senate, it lost 43 House seats, suggesting the president’s alarmism didn’t play well.

Nonetheless, Trump has stayed the course with his invasion theme, forcing a 35-day partial government shutdown when Congress refused to approve his request for $5.7 billion for more border walls. Another shutdown is possible on Friday when funding for many government agencies runs out. Given that the president couldn’t get wall funds from Congress when it was controlled by Republicans, he’s got to know the money won’t be forthcoming with Democrats in charge of the House. Something’s got to give. But such calculations don’t matter to a president who won the GOP nomination and the presidency in 2016 by railing against immigration — and who chose to hold a related rally in El Paso tonight.

Newsom and other high-profile Democrats need to be making calculations of their own on the evolving immigration issue. While the total numbers are far lower than they used to be, January was the 12th straight month in which apprehensions at the Southwest border were up at least 50 percent over the same month of the previous year. And while those attempting to illegally enter the U.S. in the past were often single men in Mexico, they are increasingly families from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador seeking asylum in America. In December, Homeland Security officials said the number of asylum seekers was about 93,000 in fiscal 2018 — a huge increase over the 55,584 reported in fiscal 2017. A Syracuse University project that tracks data on asylum seekers reports that fiscal 2018 was the sixth straight year that the percentage of asylum seekers rejected by immigration judges had increased.

Given that this pattern began under the Obama administration, it is difficult to see it as a function of Trump’s heated rhetoric. What it suggests is that more and more people want to use asylum to try to bypass a lengthy legal immigration process without sufficient cause. And the number of people who might seek to do so is staggering. According to a new Gallup survey of people in 33 Latin American and Caribbean nations, 42 million want to move to the United States, and 5 million plan to do so in the next 12 months. That’s right: 5 million in the next year.

So while it is absurd to pretend the U.S. is facing a crisis at its southern border, it is not absurd to say immigration has begun to change in profound ways. That is why immediate funding for more border barriers, increased Border Patrol staffing and additional immigration judges makes sense. Newsom is right to call Trump sending troops to the border a manufactured crisis, but the swelling number of asylum seekers isn’t make-believe. Republicans and Democrats need to address this complicated issue, hopefully while keeping the U.S. government open.